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October 6, 2008 10:47:05 PM CDT

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Is Something Rotten in the Bard's Works?

Posted Jul 6, 08 12:37 PM CDT in Arts & Living 

(Newser) – Did William Shakespeare really write the plays attributed to him? The question remains the subject of an intense academic debate, NPR reports. Those who doubt the “man from Stratford” penned his plays point to a lame rhyming epitaph on the supposed bard’s headstone, and to lack of documents tying him to his works—or even suggesting he was a writer.

All documents, says one premier Shakespeare doubter, “speak to the activity of a man who is principally a businessman. … We don't have anyone attesting to him as a playwright, as a poet. And he's the only presumed writer of his time for whom there is no contemporary evidence of a writing career. Many of us find that rather astonishing."

Source NPR

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British actor Patrick Stewart, as Macbeth, is shown during a rehearsal for a production of Shakespeare's Macbeth at the Gielgud Theatre in London, in this Sept. 25, 2007 file photo.   (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File)
An image of William Shakespeare with sunglasses is pinned the the bulletin board in a hallway at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival March 25,2008 in Ashland, Ore.   (AP Photo)
A Shakespeare folio edition is seen in this undated file photo.   (Getty Images)
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literature  • theater  • William Shakespeare  • play  • academics  • skeptics


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